6 Ways to Expand Your Mind at the Math Museum

Please don't touch the exhibit! Just kidding. The Museum of Mathematics, which opens Dec. 15 in New York City, encourages kids and adults to experiment with the installations on display. PM got an early look inside. Here are some of our favorites.

Human Tree

Human Tree

This exhibit uses software that takes a picture of you and then replaces each of your arms with a copy of your body. And on each of those copies, the arms are replaced by tinier copies of your image, and so on, creating a fractal tree.

"A fractal is a shape or pattern that repeats on a smaller scale within itself, and within that a smaller scale, so that there's detail down to the tiniest level," Glen Whitney, MoMath's founder, said during a tour. The human fractal tree takes on all kinds of shapes as you swing your arms around. Its pattern is governed by the same rules that influence the shapes of real trees, snail shells, and frost crystals.

Harmony of the Spheres

Harmony of the Spheres

As you touch the spheres in this exhibit, they light up and emit three notes to create a chord. As you move around, the notes shift up and down in half-steps—sometimes resulting in harmony, sometimes resulting in dissonance. "You can explore the world of music and look at it in a mathematical way, as the relationship between the chords," Whitney says.